[HN Gopher] Hello, Dynaboard
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       Hello, Dynaboard
        
       Author : nine_k
       Score  : 124 points
       Date   : 2022-02-08 17:40 UTC (5 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (dynaboard.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (dynaboard.com)
        
       | getcrunk wrote:
       | I understand why early stage products don't list pricing (the
       | least of which is that they are in flux) but it makes me sad when
       | I see interesting products that don't give me pricing.
       | 
       | I end up having to writeoff/ignore the product because I don't
       | have the mental space to remember it without pricing. and these
       | days ill never sign up for someone's newsletter if I can help it!
        
         | alexkern wrote:
         | CEO of Dynaboard here. Thanks for this feedback.
         | 
         | We're looking to make Dynaboard really affordable, especially
         | for smaller teams, and entirely usage-based (no per-seat cost).
         | Our goal is to price it more like a cloud infrastructure
         | product and not charge for things that do not cost us money. We
         | don't want to post something and promise something that we
         | can't deliver on, and so we decided to table announcing the
         | prices until we figure it out over the next 2 months. You can
         | find the approximate structure of the pricing on the pricing
         | page.
        
         | efsavage wrote:
         | Pricing is a required signal for me to understand if the
         | product is even worth the time to try. I don't want to spend
         | hours or more tinkering and then find out the pricing is
         | bonkers.
         | 
         | Seeing "coming soon" and "enterprise" on the pricing page is a
         | guaranteed pass from me (but not a permanent one).
        
         | pixiemaster wrote:
         | a) good new products: they know they don't know their products
         | value yet, so you can actually offer what it's worth to you and
         | they will accept that.
         | 
         | b) bad products: it's an extortion play and they will get what
         | they can.
         | 
         | solution:
         | 
         | a) if you need their product buy it, and plan how to migrate
         | away from it
         | 
         | b)buy their stock and hope that not much people plan how to
         | migrate away.
        
           | [deleted]
        
       | speedgoose wrote:
       | It sounds very interesting and I hope you will be successful.
       | 
       | How realistic hosting on-premise / in a private cloud without
       | breaking the bank is? The price is "contact us" right now. I
       | sometimes need to develop applications where privacy and GDPR is
       | critical.
       | 
       | The current pricing per developer/user is not announced and I see
       | that as a risk for me. I have been priced out of Retool, they
       | wanted more money than two good full-stack senior developers, so
       | I would like to know if your product is going to make sense for
       | me before I invest time and resources in it. I'm currently using
       | AppSmith.
        
         | arey_abhishek wrote:
         | Hi there, I'm a co-founder of Appsmith. I was happy to hear
         | that you use Appsmith. How do you like it so far? Are there
         | features that you are missing today?
        
         | pbronez wrote:
         | Yup. Critical stuff I always look for is (1) can I self-host
         | it? (2) what's my off-ramp if they 10x the price or go out of
         | business?
        
         | dvdhsu wrote:
         | Hi speedgoose; I'm founder @ Retool. I'm sorry you were priced
         | out of Retool; we don't want anybody to be that way. We're
         | trying a few pricing experiments now (including self-serve on-
         | prem, not billing per-user, etc.). I tried shooting you an
         | email to a) fix the issue, and b) gather some feedback, but I
         | don't think you have an email listed. Do you mind reaching out
         | to me at david AT retool? Thanks!
        
         | alexkern wrote:
         | Thanks for the kind words!
         | 
         | We will not be pricing per developer or per user, but rather
         | usage-based. We aim to be affordable for applications at scale,
         | because we believe the cost of an internal app should not
         | increase linearly with your headcount.
         | 
         | We've designed the system for a few deployment configurations,
         | with independent single-tenant and multi-tenant support on the
         | control plane and data plane. The goal is flexible on-prem
         | deployments that balance customer convenience with regulatory /
         | privacy requirements. At the moment though, we're focused on
         | our multi-tenant cloud environment and making that as top-notch
         | as possible.
         | 
         | You'll also be able to eject your app out of Dynaboard. The
         | code is yours, we aim to have the best editor available and
         | convenient serverless hosting so that's why you'll stick with
         | us.
        
       | ethanpil wrote:
       | Looks like a great start. Would love to see more examples and or
       | live demos of applications already built to get a feel for the
       | final product.
       | 
       | I'm curious how this compares to AppGyver
       | (https://www.appgyver.com) which was recently acquired by SAP. (I
       | am not affiliated).
        
       | RodgerTheGreat wrote:
       | "Application error: a client-side exception has occurred."
       | 
       | Nice landing page. Looks like you're missing a polyfill for
       | ResizeObserver.
        
         | swimmadude66 wrote:
         | thanks for letting us know! we are working with the site team
         | now to add that polyfill
        
         | alexkern wrote:
         | Thanks for the report. We're now shipping a polyfill for
         | ResizeObserver on the landing page. Drop me a line at alex AT
         | dynaboard DOT com if you're still running into trouble.
        
         | evandrofisico wrote:
         | Same error here, firefox ESR
        
       | vgel wrote:
       | Nitpick: the font on the landing page is really weird (Linux
       | Chrome) -- the baselines of the letters don't line up, giving it
       | a really strange appearance.
        
         | swimmadude66 wrote:
         | Hey, do you have any more info about your distro/chrome
         | version? I am running PopOS 21.10 with chrome 96.0.4664.93 and
         | everything looks normal here. We are working with the designers
         | to fix the ResizeObserver issue, but can't seem to recreate
         | this one.
         | 
         | Thanks!
        
       | nine_k wrote:
       | We're launching a private beta of our low-code tool. Think Visual
       | Basic or Delphi, but in the browser, and multiplayer.
        
         | kodah wrote:
         | You may want to use Show HN for this.
        
           | nine_k wrote:
           | Thanks, makes sense. Next time I'll remember! :)
        
             | pvg wrote:
             | You have to have something people can try for a show hn so
             | it would have been too early for this post anyway.
        
         | tluyben2 wrote:
         | If a modern take on Delphi I definitely would like to try it; I
         | used Delphi for more than a decade and yes I miss it.
        
         | econnors wrote:
         | any way to increase odds of being selected for early access?
        
           | alexkern wrote:
           | Make sure to fill out the Google Form and mention you're
           | coming from HN!
        
       | alexkern wrote:
       | Hey HN, Dynaboard founder here. Sharing a bit more about how we
       | built Dynaboard, since I think this audience will appreciate it.
       | More will be shared in future blogs :)
       | 
       | Multiplayer: We used the YJS project (https://github.com/yjs/yjs)
       | as the baseline for our multiplayer system. We created a thin
       | harness around the client and ended up implementing our own
       | server-side architecture to handle relaying between the various
       | WebSocket servers. More on how we do this soon.
       | 
       | WebAssembly: Rather than running your custom code in an iframe,
       | we run it inside a wasm-based sandbox, a compiled version of the
       | QuickJS VM (yes, it's JS-in-JS). This approach gives you
       | synchronous access to most of the DOM APIs without sacrificing
       | safety. We do some fancy ES6 Proxy management to implement the
       | FRP-like data binding system inside the VM. In production, the
       | browser runs the project's precompiled bytecode. In the future,
       | we plan to support other languages with a similar architecture
       | (Python via Pyodide, Rust, Go, etc.).
       | 
       | Code editing: We use Monaco, the same editor that VS Code uses.
       | We've had to create a handful of custom extensions, including a
       | few custom language servers, to get it to be aware of the VM
       | environment. I'm a vim-er so we will definitely have a vim mode.
        
         | alexkern wrote:
         | Just for fun, some of our engineers (including swimmadude66)
         | spun up this Hacker News look-alike[1] app in Dynaboard that
         | hits the HN API.
         | 
         | [1]
         | https://dynaboard.com/images/screenshots/DynaHacker_News.png
        
         | cxr wrote:
         | > we run [your custom code] inside a wasm-based sandbox, a
         | compiled version of the QuickJS VM (yes, it's JS-in-JS).
         | 
         | I'm curious about why. Is sychronicity the only reason? (And is
         | it really worth it? `await` makes asynchronous code paths
         | pretty unobtrusive.) Mirrors[1][2] are pretty interesting.
         | 
         | (Not sure that I agree that compile-to-WASM makes for JS-in-JS.
         | WASM isn't JS. Why do people keep conflating them?[3])
         | 
         | 1. <https://bracha.org/mirrors.pdf>
         | 
         | 2. <http://www.wirfs-brock.com/allen/posts/228>
         | 
         | 3. <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29754432>
        
       | nhance wrote:
       | Why would someone choose this over Microsoft's Power Platform or
       | Salesforce's platform?
       | 
       | Interesting tool, but it seems like it doesn't have a clear
       | audience in mind. The end user seems to be "everybody" and that's
       | a hard sale to make.
        
         | ziggus wrote:
         | It's not only unclear at first glance who the audience is, but
         | what the tool actually does. It seems like some kind of no-code
         | tool at first, but then it mentions pair programming? I'm
         | confused, and don't want to wade through a swamp of marketing
         | text.
        
           | hungryforcodes wrote:
           | I was confused about this too. Like how does it work? A web
           | assembly sandbox...
        
           | alexkern wrote:
           | We're decidedly a "low-code" or even "yes-code" tool. You use
           | the drag-and-drop interface to design the app, while all of
           | the app's logic is written in an in-browser text editor
           | environment. Everything is multiplayer from day 1. It's an
           | IDE in the style of VB6 / MS Access / FileMaker Pro, but
           | built with modern web technologies at the foundation.
           | 
           | We're building for early-stage technical teams and
           | independent developers that want to reduce the iteration time
           | on prototype -> production apps.
        
             | dustingetz wrote:
             | So multiplayer bubble but more industrial/data-centric,
             | real database (operated out of band) for full data modeling
             | power & operational scale, and use javascript to define
             | business rules with control flow and loops?
        
           | JediPig wrote:
           | Same thought here.
           | 
           | Why would a person use this over salesforce, Wordpress, or
           | the dozen other CMS systems out there? I watched the 5 minute
           | demo, it is doing nothing complex. How many one off sites we
           | all seen that are written by a tool that ended up not able to
           | handle the complexity. Tools like this need a huge "never"
           | been done before hook, and this one does not readily have it.
        
       | Stratoscope wrote:
       | Do you have a light theme? All the screenshots - and the website
       | itself - are in dark themes.
       | 
       | I can't use dark themes comfortably because of vision
       | limitations.
        
         | alexkern wrote:
         | Yes we do -- everything in the editor interface and the apps
         | you build with it have light-and-dark modes by default. We
         | didn't have the bandwidth to make the landing page have a
         | light-theme, but the product itself supports both modes
         | already.
        
           | Stratoscope wrote:
           | Wonderful, thanks! I also forgot to ask if the editor
           | supports proportional fonts. Since it is Monaco I assume it
           | does?
        
             | alexkern wrote:
             | We will via Monaco. Using the desktop app, you'll even be
             | able to load your VS Code config into Dynaboard, or use
             | your own $EDITOR.
        
       | swimmadude66 wrote:
       | Disclaimer: I am an engineer working for Dynaboard. Seeing this
       | post get so much traction here inspired me to quickly build out a
       | simple hacker news clone in-app as a small demo. Welcome to
       | HNCeption! https://i.imgur.com/73CPaKC.png
        
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       (page generated 2022-02-08 23:01 UTC)